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| Category | Investor |
Biography:
Gavin Wood is a computer scientist and Ethereum co-founder, having built the network’s 1.0 version alongside Vitalik Buterin and others in 2014. In 2016, however, Wood left to found Ethcore, which builds Ethereum software for clients. The company was eventually renamed Parity Technologies, and Wood remains its chief web officer to this day.
Wood went on to found the Web3 Foundation, a nonprofit that funds the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems. The computer scientist created Polkadot to solve Ethereum’s scalability problems, starting by utilizing the proof-of-stake consensus method.
Wood’s 2021:
Wood’s focus is now exclusively on Polkadot and its experimental development environment, Kusama, which saw a lot of action in 2021.
Most notably, the network launched its first five parachains — individual networks that run parallel to the Polkadot mainchain — in an attempt to solve the blockchain’s scalability issue. Each Polkadot parachain targets a specific prospect, such as NFTs, crowdlending or social networks. Developers can bid to rent a parachain to build their DApps, for which they are provided complete control.
After a year’s worth of hype, Polkadot parachains launched in December. The project enjoyed over 20,000 registered user accounts by year end, electing 297 validators for the network’s decentralized governance. In that same vein, Polkadot’s staking function increased its number of nominator accounts from 6,000 to 22,000. This rise came alongside an update that sees staking elections occur in multiple stages.
Polkadot also saw a v2 of its asset-transfer technology, XCM, thereby making it easier for some chains to transact between themselves. Such an upgrade also ensures that chains can develop at their own pace without losing the ability to communicate with others upgrading on a different path.
Polkadot increased its social presence over 2021, now with over 72,000 Reddit subscribers, 42,000 YouTube subscribers, and more than 1 million followers on Twitter. According to Wood’s Medium page, the Substrate repository (the software development kit for building Polkadot and Kusama-connected parachains) reached just under 500,000 lines of code.
Then there are Polkadot partnerships. Wood noted that in April, the Chainlink project offered its off-chain Oracles to all Substrate-based networks. This way, developers have access to off-chain data within their respective parachains.
Finally, Wood revealed an estimated 350 teams working within the Polkadot ecosystem, and that 50 of those teams had raised more than $670 million in early-stage funding. Suffice it to say, by Wood’s standards, Polkadot saw massive success in 2021.
Wood’s 2022:
Wood wants to launch more parachains throughout the year, all of them relying on the security features offered by the Polkadot mainchain. Wood and his team also plan to rework the network’s code to speed up and cheapen methods of communication between parachains to about 1,000 transactions per second for every shard — a process Wood calls “scaled hyper-connectivity.”
Moreover, the team envisions building out its parathread function. Parathread will make it so that teams who don’t win a parachain slot can still take advantage of the mainchain’s power and security.
Wood also claims multiple blockchain bridges are in development. The first bridge will connect the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems, while another will connect Polkadot to the Ethereum network.